Seems like you are being deliberately obtuse. Martin has accumulated the same stats on a much poorer offensive team in half the time with a QB that cant even keep a backup job right now. He also makes his mark running the ball and thru the air. Ingram has been outplayed by multiple RB's on his own offensive juggernaut team with a HOF QB drawing the defenses attention. Ingram's "strange usage" over 3 seasons has a much more logical explanation, he's a one dimensional back that thrived on Alabama's awesome offensive line.Sad too, loved the guy after his heisman and drafted him in 2 leagues as a rook, but its time to call a spade a spade.
Quite the contrary. Much more acute than you here, as I delved into a fair bit of Ingram research last year. I didn't do it all year long, but I looked at snap counts the previous year and snap counts for half of last season and after looking through quite a few players, none were used more obviously than Ingram and Mathews through the first half of the season. It's not just that these poor guys were saddled with the 1st and 10 obvious running situations without any of the juicy 2-minute drill snaps, it's that the team didn't even let them on the field much at all when they knew they weren't going to run the ball on 1st and 10. So by putting Ingram in the game, it told opposing defenses, there's a 67-75% chance the ball is going to this guy. It was an insane tipping of the hand. If you go back and watch play by play, Ingram is almost always facing 8 in the box and these guys aren't just assigned that position, they are leaning in pre-snap. If you watch some Thomas or Sproles plays, those LBs are on their heels practically dropping into coverage as the ball is snapped.
So, in summary, that is what I meant by "strange usage". Even though the Saints are a more potent offense, Ingram did not get the benefit of that. He was still running into the teeth of the defense. Martin, however, played just about every snap for the Bucs. Not really doing anything impressive. Taking a GL plunge from time to time and exploding during 2 games which still inflate his 22 game stat totals. Additionally, it's not like TB was a terrible offense during his rookie year. They were 13th in points and 9th in yards, so no, Martin wasn't exactly roughing it during his rookie year.
And sure, Freeman hasn't caught on with a new team, but it's lazy (and maybe even obtuse?) to pretend like this negates his very solid performance in 2012. 4,065 yards on a 7.3 YPA clip with a 27TD/17INT ratio. That's nothing to shake a stick at and certainly contributed strongly to Martin's success.
So does playing 4 times the snaps* and getting twice the carries really make Martin's stat compilation in 22 games that much more impressive than Ingram's compilation while playing sparingly for 37 games? Quite the contrary.
*I made that up. I don't know Ingram's snaps in his first year. But Doug has 1127 snaps in 22 games. Ingram has 424 in 27 regular season games the last 2 years. So 51.2 vs. 15.7 per game. It was meant to be an exaggeration, but apparently it wasn't far off.